150th Anniversary: 1851-2001; Dept. of Conscience: The Editorial 'We'

THE editorial ''we'' was an institution when Henry Jarvis Raymond introduced the New-York Daily Times in 1851 -- though even then some thought that newspaper editorial pages were doomed. Noting the rise of neutral, fact-based reporting, an essayist in 1866 wrote that the time was at hand ''for the abolition of editorials, and the concentration of the whole force of journalism upon presenting to the public the history and picture of the day.''

The opposite happened. Opinion journalism acquired fresh life, as readers, swamped by fact, turned to editorials for selection and judgment, salted by adjectives not sanctioned in news departments. At The Times (where traditionally the news and editorial departments operate separately, divided by a zealously guarded wall), a succession of editorial writers have been turning out blasts and bravos for 150 years.

How much weight does a Times editorial wield? One measure is the long procession of candidates seeking endorsements; another is the outcry when an editorial draws blood. In October 1968, Richard M. Nixon accused The Times of ''the lowest kind of gutter politics'' after it questioned the corrupt record of his running mate, Spiro T. Agnew. The Times responded by reprinting the entire offending editorial, with its lethal final sentence: ''In his obtuse behavior as a public official in Maryland as well as in his egregious comments in this campaign, Mr. Agnew has demonstrated that he is not fit to stand one step away from the Presidency.''

A great editorial may be hard to define, but readers know one when they see one. Such editorials are clipped out, argued over, reprinted and remembered. Two cautions are in order about the selections below: a great editorial is carefully constructed and should be read in its entirety; weighing an editorial through excerpts is like judging a car by its hood ornament. And nobody is more aware than this writer how many epochs, subjects and writers he has slighted.

Upon all topics, -- Political, Social, Moral, and Religious, -- we intend that the paper shall speak for itself; and we only ask that it may be judged accordingly. We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good; and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment, and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in society is either exactly right, or exactly wrong; what is good we desire to preserve and improve; what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.

We shall endeavor so to conduct all our discussions of public affairs, as to leave no one in doubt as to the principles we espouse, or the measures we advocate. And while we design to be decided and explicit in all our positions, we shall at the same time seek to be temperate and measured in all our language. We do not mean to write as if we were in a passion, unless that shall really be the case; and we shall make it a point to get into a passion as rarely as possible. . . . In controversies with other journals, with individuals, or with parties, we shall engage only when, in our opinion, some important public interest can be promoted thereby: -- and even then, we shall endeavor to rely more upon fair argument than upon misrepresentation or abusive language.

Sept. 18, 1851

Emancipation: A Revolution

President Lincoln's proclamation, which we publish this morning, marks an era in the history, not only of this war, but of this country and the world. It is not necessary to assume that it will set free instantly the enslaved blacks of the South, in order to ascribe to it the greatest and most permanent importance. Whatever may be its immediate results, it changes entirely the relations of the National Government to the institution of Slavery. Hitherto slavery has been under the protection of the Government; henceforth it is under its ban. The power of the Army and Navy, hitherto employed in hunting and returning to bondage the fugitive from service, are to be employed in maintaining his freedom whenever and wherever he may choose to assert it. This change of attitude is itself a revolution.

President Lincoln takes care, by great precision in his language, to define the basis on which this action rests. He issues the Proclamation ''as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing the rebellion.'' While he sincerely believes it to be an ''act of justice warranted by the Constitution,'' he issues it ''upon military necessity.'' In our judgment it is only upon that ground and for that purpose that he has any right to issue it at all. In his civil capacity as President, he has not the faintest shadow of authority to decree the emancipation of a single slave, either as an ''act of justice'' or for any other purpose whatever. As Commander-in-Chief of the army he has undoubtedly the right to deprive the rebels of the aid of their slaves. -- just as he has the right to take their horses, and to arrest all persons who may be giving them aid and comfort. . . .

But all this opens a vast and most difficult subject, with which we do not propose now to deal. In time, however, it will challenge universal attention, and demand for the solution of the problems which it involves the ablest and most patient statesmanship of the land.

Jan. 3, 1863

Peace With Freedom

Germany is doomed to sure defeat. Bankrupt in statesmanship, overmatched in arms, under the moral condemnation of the civilized world, befriended only by the Austrian and the Turk, two backward-looking and dying nations, desperately battling against the hosts of three great Powers to which help and reinforcement from States now neutral will certainly come should the decision be long deferred, she pours out the blood of her heroic subjects and wastes her diminishing substance in a hopeless struggle that postpones but cannot alter the fatal decree.

Yet the doom of the German Empire may become the deliverance of the German people if they will betimes but seize and hold their own. Leipzig began and Waterloo achieved the emancipation of the French people from the bloody, selfish and sterile domination of the Corsican Ogre. St. Helena made it secure. Sedan sent the little Napoleon sprawling and the statesmen of France instantly established and proclaimed the Republic. Will the Germans blindly insist on having their Waterloo, their Sedan -- their St. Helena, too? A million Germans have been sacrificed, a million Germans homes are desolate. Must other millions die and yet other millions mourn before the people of Germany take in the court of reason and human liberty their appeal from the imperial and military caste that rushes them to their ruin?

Dec. 15, 1914

A Way of Life

Though the United States has lived for two years under a Neutrality Act which expresses its wish to remain at peace, the American people are not neutral now in any situation which involves the risk of war, nor will they remain neutral in any future situation which threatens to disturb the balance of world power.

American opinion today is openly and overwhelmingly on the side of China as against Japan: so openly and so overwhelmingly, that it has winked at and approved a flagrant violation of the whole spirit of the Neutrality Act by the Roosevelt Administration and forced Congress itself to give tacit consent to the deliberate nullification of that law. American opinion was just as definitely aligned against the seizure of Austria by force of German arms. It is as nearly unanimous today as it has ever been, in any question of foreign policy, in applauding the determination of a small country in Central Europe -- Czechoslovakia -- to stand up for its rights as a sovereign nation and to fight for its independence, if need be, instead of tamely going under. It will be just as nearly unanimous tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, whenever and wherever something that comes home to the inbred American conception of liberty and democracy is at stake.

The truth is that no act of Congress can conscript the underlying loyalties of the American people.

June 15, 1938

The Christmas Bombing

In the same week that American astronauts fired their spacecraft home from the moon, American pilots fired bombs that broke through the heavens over a peasant nation in Asia. America the ingenious and America the vengeful had both struck.

Many millions of people in countries the world over have been bombarded from the air in this century. The United States has not. In this season of religious assessment and personal resolution, the United States and its people are being judged for what our Government is doing with its mighty technology. Are we now the enemy -- the new barbarians?

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Which is the real America? It is no longer a matter of how we are being judged in the eyes of the world; that judgment is obvious. It is how we look upon ourselves as a people -- and how we will be marked on the Day of Judgment.

Dec. 24, 1972

Nixon Should Resign

The visible disintegration of President Nixon's moral and political authority, of his capacity to act as Chief Executive, of his claim to leadership and to credibility leads us to the reluctant conclusion that Mr. Nixon would be performing his ultimate service to the American people -- and to himself -- by resigning his office before this nation is forced to go through the traumatic and divisive process of impeachment.

The doubts about Mr. Nixon that have gathered an ominous momentum over the past twelve months have arisen, basically, from three different sources -- constitutional, political and personal -- and they are now flowing together in a surging torrent.

Every President comes under attack from the political opposition, as is normal in a democracy; and every President makes misjudgments and administrative errors. If that were all that could be said about Mr. Nixon, the possibility of his resignation or impeachment would never arise. The gravity of the case against him rests instead on his deliberate violations of the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and, flowing out of this, the collapse of public confidence in the integrity of the man who only one year ago was elected to the Presidency by the largest popular majority in American history. . . .

The one last great service that Mr. Nixon can now perform for his country is to resign. He has been trying to ''tough it out'' for too long at too great a cost to the nation. As long as he clings to office, he keeps the Presidency swamped in a sea of scandal and the American public in a morass of concern and confusion. The state of the union requires nothing less than a change in the sorry state of the Presidency.

For the past 127 years, The New York Times's type has been hot, set like this paragraph, with each letter summoned to align itself beside the next until a whole line of words could be cast in molten lead. At the direction of a linotypist, the letters danced into place with the precision of the Rockettes, but to the discerning eye they were always individualists. Look closely and you can see one tilting left or right, or a wounded one with a nicked shoulder, or a drunken one refusing to toe the mark.

This morning we say farewell on this page and the page opposite to these hot characters that so often seemed to have the printer's devil in them. . . . We switch to cool electronic characters that look like this. They dance lightly into line, choreographed and disciplined, head to toe, by computer. When we write, they come before us as green images on a black screen, which is now our paper. To dismiss an ill-fitting character, we depress a button marked ''Del Char,'' meaning delete that misfit. To bring a replacement to life, we simply tap another key. When whole groups of them need to be banished, our lordly fingers reach for other buttons marked ''Del Word'' or ''Del Para,'' and poof! the words or paragraphs disappear.

With these powers of instantaneous creation and destruction we begin to understand how censors and other tyrants can misjudge the swift execution of their commands to be confirmation of the wisdom of their thought. . . .

We are automated -- every writer his own printer -- from the neck down. But in the head, alas, we remain hotly fallible, like the old characters, condemned to a life without buttons that automatically delete error, misjudgment and other outrages. Until you hear otherwise, it is wise to assume that this technology does not relieve the reader of the obligation to exercise the customary caution.

May 26, 1978

The Ruling for Mr. Bush

The United States Supreme Court has brought the presidential election to a conclusion in favor of Gov. George W. Bush, but its decision to bar a recount in Florida comes at considerable cost to the public trust and the tradition of fair elections. Our national history bears the comforting lesson that the American people's confidence in the rule of law and the stability of their institutions will not be damaged in the long run. It is incumbent on citizens and elected officials alike to respect the authority of the ruling and the legitimacy of the new presidency whether or not they agree with the court's legal reasoning.

In the short term, Mr. Bush and Vice President Al Gore bear great responsibility for bringing the nation together in spirit if not in immediate political agreement. Mr. Bush needs to be gracious and unifying in victory, and Vice President Gore must master the difficult task of placing the national need for continuity ahead of any bitterness he may feel. The five weeks since the election have seen the writing of an entirely unexpected chapter in the nation's political history. This will long be remembered as an election decided by a conservative Supreme Court in favor of a conservative candidate while the ballots that could have brought a different outcome went uncounted in Florida.

Dec. 13, 2000

An Unfathomable Attack

Remember the ordinary, if you can. Remember how normal New York City seemed at sunrise yesterday, as beautiful a morning as ever dawns in early September. The polls had opened for a primary election, and if the day seemed unusual in any way, that was the reason -- the collective awareness that the night would be full of numbers. All the innumerable habits and routines that define a city were unbroken. Everyone was preoccupied, in just the way we usually call innocence.

And by 10:30 a.m. all that had gone. Lower Manhattan had become an ashen shell of itself, all but a Pompeii under the impact of a terrorist attack involving two airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center and then brought its twin towers down. In Washington, a third plane had plunged into the Pentagon. . . .

It was, in fact, one of those moments in which history splits, and we define the world as ''before'' and ''after.'' . . . What we live with now, beyond shock and beyond the courage witnessed on the streets in New York and Washington yesterday, is an urge for reprisal. But this is an age when even revenge is complicated, when it is hard to match the desire for retribution with the need for certainty. We suffer from an act of war without any enemy nation with which to do battle. The same media that brought us the pictures of a collapsing World Trade Center shows us the civilians who live in the same places that terrorists may dwell, whose lives are just as ordinary and just as precious as the ones that we have lost. That leaves us all, for now, with fully burdened emotions, undiminished by anything but the passage of the few hours that have elapsed since midmorning yesterday. There is a world of consoling to be done.